ained in the same detestable colours. It may
be said, indeed, that they were worse than the King himself. For the King
at least may be pleaded the coarse temptations of a brutal nature; but
what palliation can be urged for the peers and judges who sacrificed Anne
Boleyn, or More, or Fisher, according to the received hypothesis? Not even
the excuse of personal fear of an all-powerful despot. For Henry had no
Janissaries or Praetorians to defend his person or execute his orders. He
had but his hundred yeomen of the guard, not more numerous than the
ordinary followers of a second-rate noble. The Catholic leaders, who were
infuriated at his attacks upon the Church, and would if they could have
introduced foreign armies to dethrone him, insisted on his weakness as an
encouragement to an easy enterprise. Beyond those few yeomen they urged
that he had no protection save in the attachment of the subjects whom he
was alienating. What strange influence was such a king able to exercise
that he could overawe the lords and gentry of England, the learned
professions, the municipal authorities? How was it that he was able to
compel them to be the voluntary instruments of his cruelty? Strangest of
all, he seems to have needed no protection, but rather to have been
personally popular, even among those who disapproved his public policy.
The air was charged with threats of insurrection, but no conspiracy was
ever formed to kill him, like those which so often menaced the life of his
daughter. When the North was in arms in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and a
question rose among the leaders whether in the event of victory the King
was to be deposed, it was found that anyone who proposed to remove him
would be torn in pieces by the people.

Granting that Henry VIII. was, as Dickens said of him, "a spot of blood
and grease" on the page of English history, the contemporary generation of
Englishmen must have been fit subjects of such a sovereign. Every country,
says Carlyle, gets as good a government as it deserves. The England of the
Cromwells and the Cranmers, the Howards and the Fitzwilliams, the
Wriothesleys and the Pagets, seems to have been made of baser materials
than any land of which mankind has preserved a record. Roman Catholics may
fairly plead that out of such a race no spiritual reform is likely to have
arisen which could benefit any human soul. Of all the arguments which can
be alleged for the return of England to the ancient fold, this